The Flash Gordon Serials 1936-1940 An Illustrated Guide

 

Killer Serials

The Flash Gordon Serials 1936-1940 
An Illustrated Guide Second Edition
By Roy Kinnard, Tony Cankovich and R. J. Vitone
McFarland Books
ISBN 9781476695914

The Flash Gordon Serials 1936-1940 An Illustrated Guide Second Edition is a revised and expanded (although it seems shorter and less detailed to me) paperback edition of the earlier book, The Flash Gordon Serials 1936-1940 A Heavily Illustrated Guide... which makes little sense to me in calling it a second edition when the title of the original book was different. Also, it’s something of a contradiction because although the original was ‘a heavily illustrated guide’ as opposed to this ‘illustrated guide’, this second edition boasts a whole slew of new pictures. So it’s even more heavily illustrated than the first edition... my brain is reeling. 

Anyhow, any book dedicated to the three greatest theatrical serials ever made is a good thing right? Yup, absolutely and, this book is a highly enjoyable and illuminating read (reminding me of a lot of stuff I’d forgotten over the years). It’s nice to have something to remind the older generations of just how fantastic these serials are and, perhaps, even introduce a younger generation to the magnificence of these things.

In the earlier pages, which detail a short history of the sound serials, the main author is perhaps a little PC when he says the original Alex Raymond Flash Gordon strip was ‘inspired by’ the John Carter novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. My understanding was that when Burroughs was trying to pitch a comic strip adaptation, he spent a lot of time with King Features who then rejected him and brought out their own, heavily influenced version... Flash Gordon. Of course, there are some major differences between the characters but the kind of exotic world building in the strip surely owes a debt to Burroughs. 

So, some key points...

Despite using some stock footage from other movies, some old props and some sets from other features, with all the new costumes and worlds to create for a wealth of characters, this first serial was indeed the most expensive theatrical serial ever made, coming in at $350,000 which, of course, is a huge amount for the 1930s. The Second serial, Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars was much cheaper and the third serial, Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe was cheaper still... and shot in a few weeks (despite looking absolutely marvellous in terms of production design... those walking bombs get me every time). 

Contrary to modern popular myth, the change to Mars instead of Mongo in the second serial was not due to the famous Orson Welles radio broadcast of War Of The Worlds, which was not aired until the following year. Alas, it pains me to find out now that modern, home release versions of this second serial are missing about 90 seconds of rocket ship battle from Chapter 3.

As far as the third serial goes, the dome in this was actually constructed for the James Whale movie Green Hell but, actually, Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe shot on that set first. There were plans for a fourth serial after the Second World War but Universal stopped making chapter plays in 1946 so it was not to be. 

Now, I’m probably wrong but I think the first book was laid out differently with the information organised in an alternate way. But, since that edition is in storage now I can’t check. But this has a general overview of each serial followed by a synopsis of each and every chapter, accompanied by mini reviews and comments of interest. Then there are three appendices... one on the Buck Rogers serial (which, again alas, I am finding also had a special Chapter 7B which was shown in some theatres and which I’ve never seen released commercially... so it probably hasn't survived). 

Then, at the end of the book, we get some very brief biographies of fifty of the cast and crew, including a somewhat ‘truncated highlights’ version of their filmographies. Again things of note are...

Universal monster star Anne Gwynne, who played the treacherous traitor Sonia in the third serial, is actually Chris Pine’s grandmother. And did you know that James Pierce, who played Prince Thun of the Lion Men in the first serial, was one of the early screen incarnations of Tarzan and even married Edgar Rice Burrough’s daughter. 

Plus, the tragedy of Priscilla Lawson, who was the best of the screen incarnations of Princess Aura... who lost her leg in service during the Second World War and died from complications in 1958, at the age of 44. 

There’s also a third appendix which looks at other incarnations of the serials mentioned here and I was startled and a little frustrated to find that there was a Buck Rogers In The 25th Century TV show in the 1950s but only one episode is said to exist and nobody has released it commercially. I would love to be able to source a copy of this from somewhere. Not to mention the 1967 Turkish Flash Gordon movie... I need to track that one down, somehow, too. Bet it got destroyed in one of the fires that plagued the Turkish film industry (and their insurance companies) over the decades.

And that’s me done with this rather excellent book on some of my favourite cinematic confections. The Flash Gordon Serials 1936-1940 An Illustrated Guide - Second Edition is definitely worth picking up if you are a friend of these serials and I’d grab one before it goes out of print again if I were you. And if you want to read my own reviews of some of the serials and a movie covered in this book, you can find them here... Flash Gordon 1936 (reviewed here), Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars (reviewed here), Buck Rogers (reviewed here), Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe (reviewed here) and Flash Gordon 1980 (reviewed here).

Laurel and Hardy - The Silent Years: 1928 and 1929

Odd Pairings

Laurel and Hardy  - The Silent Years: 1928
Laurel and Hardy  - The Silent Years: 1929
Various directors for Hal Roach
USA 1927
Eureka Masters Of Cinema
Two separate sets.

I’ve been putting off writing this review of these two Eureka sets for a while now, following on from Laurel and Hardy - The Silent Years: 1927 (reviewed here).

One reason is because I really don’t have too much to say about them. They were both comic geniuses and these films reflect that in no uncertain terms. But, the other reason is... okay here goes...

I bought the first set and then the second set as gifts for my father. We’d just about finished watching the second set, the 1928 set, when my dad’s ongoing illness got a lot worse and, within a month or two, he passed away. I felt like I couldn’t write about this set for a good long while because, the idea of sitting down and watching a Laurel and Hardy movie without him being around seemed like a heavy stone hanging around my heart (and obviously still does). 

Just over a year on now and, I bought the third Eureka collection, the 1929 set, in honour of his memory and watched them all with my mum. I guess it’s about time I wrote something about these but, not sure I have too much to contribute. But I need to get the review down on paper...err...on screen so, yeah. Skip this if it’s not to your taste, obviously.

Both these volumes are absolute gold (although I still prefer The Marx Brothers) and the pairing of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in their more familiar roles is pretty much established now... the studio finally realised what they had when these two got together! And like most of their films, the two characters leave a lot of inadvertent destruction in their wake.

Well, not entirely inadvertent. One of the recurring themes every now and again has them picking a fight, or somehow getting one started for them, with a character of opposing views, which usually escalates until everyone else in their slapstick ecosystem gets drawn into the action and gets something torn, something kicked or something custard pied until the free for all really gets going. Then a cop will probably turn up, often played by the great Edgar Kennedy, who will then also get drawn in and get involved in the carnage. 

Other films will see the bumbling Stan just doing something wrong or getting the wrong end of the stick (while throwing in little absurdities like doing the manual work required for a scene and ‘then’ putting his gloves on to do the task with) and it all ends in chaos... again often involving any onlookers who seem to be standing by, or in the general vicinity of the ticking time bomb of the chaos. It’s always great to watch and, sometimes, will have you laughing out loud (if you have a pulse). 

But, as I said, it’s a short review by me for these two Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray sets but, I would say the restorations are mostly wonderful and these are definitely the versions to get (and in some case, due to rediscovered film elements, the only game in town). I only hope that Eureka decide to carry on with these sets and start giving the duo’s wonderful talkies the deluxe treatment too. 

The Avengers (1998 movie version)

 

 

In Word Or Steed 

The Avengers
Directed by Jeramiah S. Chechik
USA 1998
Warner Brothers
German Blu Ray edition

Well now, since The Avengers movie is well known for being a total disaster both critically and at the box office, I thought I’d revisit it now, after watching all its predecessors, because I remember I half enjoyed it and I think people at the time were being a little unfair, critically, to a movie that the director complained was taken away from him and chopped up into little pieces.

Apparently Warner Brothers sliced out 50 minutes from the cut the director delivered and watching it now, knowing that, it makes perfect sense why the damn thing jumps about all over the place, failing to make any of those story jumps clear in any capacity and basically leaving an audience collectively raising their eyebrows.

So we have what is supposed to be the first meeting between John Steed, played here by a young Ralph Fiennes and Emma Peel, played here by a young Uma Thurman… so this is presumably supposed to be taking place between the third and fourth seasons of the original TV show of The Avengers (reviewed here) but, it doesn’t really make it clear.

Supporting them, in a cast so full of beloved British actors too numerous to mention here (in spite of the movie being a foreign affair, so to speak, put out by those strange American individuals), we have Sean Connery as the big bad guy, looking to bring the world to its knees due to his weather control devices, Jim Broadbent as the wheelchair bound Mother and, in a nice voice cameo, the original John Steed himself, Patrick Macnee, as an invisible agent at the Ministry.

So… it has some nice set pieces and , in terms of shot design, decor and costumes, well... it looks really great. The problem with this one really is, it would seem to me (though, nobody has seen the original cut other than the people involved at Warners), all to do with the fact that it must have had a load of important scenes, some quite noticeable in their absence (not to mention important story points), chopped out of it wholesale to leave quite a mess of a movie, it’s sad to say. So as an overall experience, it’s sadly lacking even for those audience members who weren’t a fan of the original show and, certainly not the action movie franchise launcher the executives in charge had hoped it to be. But, yeah, they did it to themselves I guess.

A couple of things of note, as far as I’m concerned...

In the opening scene, where Steed goes through a live assault course facing off against unlikely enemies (inspired by an episode of The New Avengers, reviewed here), Joel McNeely’s rearrangement of the more famous Laurie Johnson theme to the show is used (in not a very punchy or useful arrangement I would say). However, the version used here has the season seven counterpoint melody in it which, if you’ve read my review of that series, you will know is supposed to be a leitmotif melody associated with Linda Thorsen’s Series Seven character Tara King. Why the hell this has been included when this film is dealing with the character of Emma Peel is totally beyond me, it has to be said.

Secondly, the chess game played between Steed and Mrs. Peel is a replica of the same game referenced in Blade Runner (reviewed here), so, something for followers of that film to take note of, at least.

My one final thought on this sad but, still watchable, mess of a movie is that the two lead actors are certainly not to blame. Both Fiennes and Thurman seem to be doing their best to make their line deliveries, their body language and mannerisms similar to those employed by Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg respectively… and they’re doing it pretty well. The one problem here is that neither of them look like their predecessors to any extent. Fiennes is way too thin and Thurman’s hair and costuming is far from what it should be so, they were fighting a losing battle on that front from the start, I feel.

And that’s me done with the 1998 attempted reboot of The Avengers. Not a successful film but at the same time, if that original director’s cut were ever to surface in the future, I’d be desperate to take a look. Until then, I can only lament the film and hope that some day the original material is released. 

Body Work - Rivers Of London

Car Wars

Body Work (Rivers Of London)
By Ben Aaronovitch, Cartmel, Sullivan and Guerrero
Titan Comics
ISBN 9781782761877

Okay... strap in because this now gets really complicated. 

So first things first... I’m withholding my reviews of the next two Rivers Of London novels for now because, in the second of those, which is called The Hanging Tree, it became evident that Ben Aaronovitch was not only referencing past books but also some of the Rivers Of London comics he’d written, specifically this one, Body Work. This one takes place just before Foxglove Summer (the review of which I’ll hold until, probably next week or the week after). However, there are also at least three comic series and at least one or two books which were written later but which also slot in before The Hanging Tree. So it’s kind of getting very complex and, while my intention is to at least try and slot in the trade paperback reprint volumes of the comics in the appropriate places (so Foxglove Summer after this but then I have to read another three more of these collections before I publish The Hanging Tree review), I will leave the novellas and short story collections until the order they were released, rather than attempt to slot those in too. 

But, yeah, I think one of the comic collections also takes place before any of the books so... I need to research a little further. It’s already getting confusing to me though... this is like trying to decipher reading orders for the Marvel comics published in the 1960s and 1970s (and beyond)... which is also rubbing off now on the interpenetration of the various cinema and TV versions of those comics.

Anyway, let’s not fret for now. I can get through comics fairly quickly and the Body Work trade paperback (one of many of the novels and comic collections in this series I have managed to get signed copies of because Forbidden Planet in London always seems to have an abundance of signed stock of these things, due to regular visits by the writer) includes not just the five issues that make up that story but also a number of short stories (many of them single pages) which I am assuming were inserted into the original materials at the end of each issue. So also included are a Beverly Brook story called Off Their Trolley, a Molly story called Red Mist, a Toby story called Night Of The Living Dog, Sleep No More (which features a few of the protagonists), another Toby The Dog story called Pursuit... and a Nightingale piece called Urgent Summons (also featuring Peter and Molly).

But what is the comic like? Well, I’m delighted to report that, unlike many writers who attempt a comic book rendition of the characters and themes they’ve been writing successfully in novels, this one at least works fairly well. You immediately get the same feel of the characters and situations as you do when reading the novels and there is much in the things which are left unsaid too, which are like little Easter eggs if you know the main books. For instance, Peter’s off hand comment to the reader about not daring to look in Molly’s packet. People who haven’t read the books may struggle with that reference but regular readers will know he’s worrying about what exotic and possibly inedible dish Molly, housekeeper of The Folly, has given him as a packed lunch.

This one is a nice story about a few possessed cars which he and officer Guleed are trying to find out about, since their have been some deaths which are definitely Falcon related*. Guleed definitely featured in The Hanging Tree as a major character and the cars here are referenced in that tome as a throwaway joke too.

And it’s not really dumbed down for the comic books, at least in story terms (although no ‘sex and consequence’ takes place in this story). That being said, I have a couple of criticisms about the look of a couple of the characters. I mean, Peter and Guleed are almost perfect, just how I imagined them. Nightingale, however, is not... he’s just a little older in looks to my mind and could have done with just a little more ageing here, I reckon. Also, although Beverly Brook looks just like I imagined in face and body type... she’s wearing some kind of latex-ish, one piece, skin tight affair when she’s swimming in her river. I’m sure in the books she tends to be naked (unless my more sexier brain functions intervened in my reading assumptions) so... not sure what happened here. Something lost in translation? 

However, other than this and, not so many pop culture references as you get in the main books, this did feel like a nice companion piece to the prose stories and not in any way an unnatural add on to the series. So I will definitely be reading more of these (which is just as well since I bought a load of them over a year ago). So, yeah, Rivers Of London - Body Work is a pretty nice volume with some mostly appropriate art and it’s a fast moving addition to the books. Definitely one to check out if you are into the main novels.

*The discreet code name for criminal cases which turn out to involve actual magic, which the majority of the Metropolitan police force dislike considering.

Laurel and Hardy - The Silent Years: 1927

Odd Pairings

Laurel and Hardy  - 
The Silent Years: 1927
Various directors for Hal Roach
USA 1927
Eureka Masters Of Cinema

We’ve always liked Laurel and Hardy in my house. When I was a kid growing up in the 1970s, the dynamic duo were on television regularly… until around the mid-1980s when legal wrangling from various studios and estates kept them off people’s TV sets for decades… but their shorts... their talkies... were on TV quite often before that and we used to watch them a lot. My dad even had a Super 8 projector in the loft with a few reels of Super 8 cut downs from their silent movies, which he used to say were possibly even funnier than their talkies. 

So it was a welcome surprise when Eureka Masters Of Cinema released some of those early silents, the surviving movies from 1927, on Blu Ray disc towards the end of 2024 as a double disc set called Laurel and Hardy  - The Silent Years: 1927. A perfect Christmas present for my dad and, over a number of weeks, we watched one a week in front of our family Friday night movie. The films included here are Lucky Dog, Duck Soup, Slipping Wives, Love ‘Em And Weep, Why Girls Love Sailors, With Love and Hisses, Sailors Beware, Do Detectives Think, Flying Elephants, Sugar Daddies, The Second Hundred Years, Call Of The Cuckoo, Putting Pants On Philip and The Battle Of The Century (which I think is one of the films that got remade by them as a talkie too). 

Now, I will have to say from the top, something that Eureka perhaps should have mentioned on their packaging and marketing… although it’s quite obvious why they didn’t. And that is that, for the most part, while it’s true that Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy both feature in every short movie on these discs… they are rarely paired together and sometimes don’t really even meet much in the course of these stories (which, of course, all amount to extended, epic sketches, running around 20 minutes each). So, it’s not quite, until the very last two films maybe (with small exceptions), the boys reach their full on ‘Laurel and Hardy’ alter egos, for sure. 

However, there is a lot of interest and entertainment to be had looking at the way these two actors evolved their characters and their on screen relationship together as the shorts went on. For instance, a lot of Stan Laurel’s trademarks such as the crying at the camera and the funny, legs akimbo jump he sometimes does are firmly there right from the get go, whatever character he’s playing. Similarly, Oliver Hardy’s facial expressions are very much the personae he inhabits more famously down the line, in most of these. And both of them, right from the get go, are constantly looking into the camera at the audience at appropriate moments and breaking the fourth wall… something else they used to do a lot in their double act. And there are a few times when they’re paired up and are brilliant together (Stan Laurel was obviously contributing to the content of these by this point) and you wonder why they are back in a different capacity in the next movie. 

So in Duck Soup, for example… which was a lost film for years and helps underline the importance of restorations and releases like this… the regular routine is almost there. And, again, in Do Detectives Think?, the two are partnered up in exactly the kind so of situations they would find themselves in as a phenomenon in their own right. And asides from their circumstances, The Second Hundred Years seems not far from what they would become either. Now, most people say it wasn’t until Putting Pants on Phillip as to where everything came together but, that seems a little less like the pairing than those I just mentioned… although I think we can all agree that The Battle Of The Century, with its extended custard pie fight, is where everything comes together nicely for them. So it’s a little of a shame that its the last film to come within the boundaries of the title of this particular collection… although Eureka have already just released an equally limited edition set of their silent shorts from 1928 (yeah, I’m saving that one for a Father’s Day* present… it’s currently hidden in a stack of blu rays). 

The set is sometimes funny, occasionally hilarious but almost always interesting. The restorations are all great and hard won with the only casualty, dammit, being a bridging sequence in The Battle Of The Century between the two main acts, which has been recreated by a few stills which promise more than they can deliver here, alas. And a shout out to fans of Abbott and Costello on that particular film. Look to Ollie’s left in the crowd of spectators at the boxing match and you will quite clearly see a young Lou Costello amongst the onlookers. We knew he was supposed to be in there and we thought we’d have a hard time spotting him but he’s using the same mannerisms for rowdy whistling he would use in his movies two decades later so, yeah, he’s easy to spot and it’s nice to see one half of one of the great double acts rubbing shoulders briefly with the greatest comedy double act of all time. 

And that’s me done, I think on this one. If you are a fan of comedy cinema then Laurel and Hardy - The Silent Years: 1927 is an absolutely essential purchase for your library. I’m really pleased to have had the opportunity to see these and I am looking forward to the next set immensely. 

 * RIP Brian Michael Cox 

Resident Evil (2026)

Permanent Residents

Resident Evil (2026)
Directed by Zach Cregger
Germany/United States/Czech Republic/Canada
Australia/New Zealand/France 2026
Columbia Pictures

So yet another new version of Resident Evil hits our screens, an adaptation (of sorts) of the successful series of video games which have been going since the 1990s. So this is, what, the 8th Resident Evil movie (counting only the live actions films and not the animated features... I need to see those, perhaps) and it’s also the second reboot, so to speak, since the last movie in the franchise, also a reboot, failed to gain any traction. 

So this one is the next film from the writer/director Zach Cregger, who had the huge horror hit Weapons last year (reviewed here). He’s apparently adapted another of his stand alone scripts into a Resident Evil movie, after getting the green light to be part of the franchise and, yeah, it kinda shows, in some ways, that it’s a rewrite of something else... but not to the detriment of the franchise, for sure. I’ve not had much experience of the video games but I know the movies and... well, none of the main characters seem to be in this. Not a problem though. 

I will say up front that I almost didn’t bother with this one because... surprise, surprise... the trailer put me off. Again. Does anybody in Hollywood know how to cut a trailer anymore. All I’ve seen for the last year are bad trailers which made me question whether I wanted to trek out for the movies or not. Better marketing people are definitely needed here.

Anyhow, I saw it and I’ll tell you now, I was rather pleasantly surprised. Even though I kind of hated the main character. He’s played by Austin Abrams who plays him quite similarly (as written, I would guess) to the horrible, drop-out character he played in Weapons so, yeah, I’m bringing baggage with me but, I at least overcame that hurdle. The actor does what he does well and, even though the character is not somebody I would want to hang out with, he does make things believable for the audience. 

Okay, so the film itself is not the action movie that the previous films were. It’s actually got a few elements in it which make it much closer to the experience of an audience member playing a video game and, I couldn’t quite work out if I liked this approach or not. But, it’s certainly effective so, what we have is a character who has absolutely no idea what is happening in Racoon City and its surrounding areas and, yup, we stay just with this character through the entire movie. Like you would if you were playing a game. It even switches to first person view in a couple of shots but... don’t remember that happening in the game I played (or tried to play, I was useless at the copy of Resident Evil 2 which was bundled with my old Playstation), to be honest. 

So he, and the audience, has no idea of what’s going on and... bullets are almost as much of a problem here as they were, quite deliberately, in the original game. I remember never having enough bullets when playing and you’d be forced to sneak around zombies (or actually organisms much more complex in this movie) and be constantly looking for more ammunition. Same thing here... the central character is always checking his shells and bullets and worrying about how he’s going to solve his next problem.

And the creatures in this are impressive. They are all mutations of some kind and make for some very surreal and grotesque encounters throughout the movie... bringing many a surprise and unexpected dilemma to challenge the protagonist as he goes to try and deliver his medical supplies (that’s the basic plot of the movie, by the way... a medical courier is trying to deliver something to the hospital in Racoon City but, by the time he gets there, things have already gone pear shaped).

Now, the director is not above resorting to many a horror movie cliché in this... so you get scenes of flickering lights meant to reveal and conceal, to keep the audience on edge. I even heard the old reliable ‘put a blatant heartbeat tempo’ on the score to ramp things up. So, yeah, it’s an exercise in jump scares too and... I can’t blame him for trying. Those don’t always work but the sheer inventiveness and gory creativity between each creature encountered more than makes up for this and sometimes work better as a jump scare in themselves. 

And I’m not sure I want to say much more abut Resident Evil (2026)... it’s not a film you are expecting if you only know the other seven movies but, it’s pretty effective and does feel much more like you’re being thrust into a ‘survival horror’ environment than those earlier movies too. It’s doing something right and I had a pretty good time with this one, I would say. I’ll definitely be picking this one up on Blu Ray when it comes out.

Tales Of Halloween

Pumpkin Patch

Tales Of Halloween
Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, Axelle Carolyn, 
Adam Gierasch, Andrew Kasch, Neil Marshall, 
Lucky McKee, Mike Mendez, Dave Parker, 
Ryan Schifrin, John Skipp and Paul Solet
USA 2015 
Arrow Films DVD Region 2

Well then... I finally got around to watching the elusive Tales For Halloween in time for this year’s Halloween posts. I say elusive because I bought this one a couple of years before the pandemic at FrightFest for a fiver but, every October when I try and watch it, it seems to have buried itself under a pile of movies and I never seem to be able to lay hands on it but, this year it managed to turn up when a pile of physical media overturned itself on top of me and so I put it to one side for the right time. 

And I have to say... for a portmanteau film, which are often hit and miss anyway, this one is pretty good. You have ten short movies by ten different directors (some of them very famous genre directors like Lucky McKee and Neil Marshall) and they all seem to take place on the same night, although in different towns.* You can tell it’s the same night because, on many of them, George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead is playing on TV (although, in one of the clips, it seems to be Carnival Of Souls). 

And, contrary to what you would expect form a string of shorts put together, even the ones that are maybe not quite as good as the others are still quite watchable and immensely entertaining. So ten, not bad, movies. And to boot you have a radio DJ linking some (but not all, she’s definitely underused in this movie) of the segments played by none other than Adrienne Barbeau, delivering her full on, smoky radio voice, as she did when she played radio DJ Stevie Wayne in John Carpenter’s The Fog (reviewed here). So more or less an homage but, presumably not named as such due to copyright reasons, I would guess. 

Standouts for me would be Neil Marshall’s segment Bad Seed, where a carved pumpkin comes to life and starts eating people, because it’s really silly and, considering I don’t like slasher movies so much (unless they’re Italian), the Friday 31st segment directed by Mike Mendez, which features a cute, stop motion looking alien (it’s probably really CGI) looking for a trick or treat. 

Also, another nice thing is the use of various famous directors amongst the actors in the odd cameo. So along with people like Barbara Crampton and Lin Shaye you have the likes of Stuart Gordon, Mick Garris and John Landis coming along for the ride. Which is nice and perhaps shows what a close knit community the horror community is (the great Dr. Rebekah McKendry is also in this). 

Added to this, among a whole list of composers scoring the shorts, we have title music done by the great Lalo Schifrin. Now, as far as I’m concerned it’s not one of his best but I did notice that one of the directors is also a Schifrin so, I have to wonder if the title music was pulled in as a favour to someone. But I also loved a musical moment in the segment The Weak And The Wicked where a pocket watch brings us to a flashback of a memory in the same style as a Sergio Leone western... and the music suddenly gets all Morricone in tone. So, yeah, some nice things to be found in this selection, to be sure. 

And that’s me finally done with Tales From Halloween. A short review perhaps but a definite recommendation from me if you want something fun and frivolous to watch during this years ‘Halloween festivities’. I believe some people are still doing this stuff and certainly my local Tesco, with it’s gazillions of novelty horror items put out for the kids in October, seems to indicate that it’s still a thing. 

*Nope. Tag line on the poster says “One Night. One Town. Ten Chilling Stories.” so, I guess that didn’t quite come across to me because, well, all the stories should be overlapping with each other then, right?

Backrooms

Out On A Liminal

Backrooms
Directed by Kane Parsons
USA/Canada 2026 
A24

Warning: Mild spoilers.

Okay... so I finally caught up with this year’s successful horror(ish) movie Backrooms. It’s based on a viral and free youtube series, called The Backrooms, also written by Kane Parsons who, at the young age of 19, directed this feature film reboot (or possibly a continuation but focusing on different characters) and giving A24 what is, to date, their most successful movie. So I guess we’ll be seeing more of these... especially since it’s predicted that a trend in modern horror movie releases seem to be following this route of ‘liminal horror’... which I’m not 100% quite understanding but I think I get the vibe of it, right enough. 

The film stars the great Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark who, honestly, is always a joy to watch but I found the American accent he’s putting on for this totally changed the way I responded to him. I dunno, I seemed to have less respect for him with that accent but, given the path the character takes by the end of the movie, perhaps that’s just as well. The film also stars Renate Reinsve as Mary, his psychiatrist and, the plot is as follows...

Set in 1990, Clark, who has been kicked out by his wife and now lives in his unsuccessful furniture store... Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire... is having problems not with just the lack of customers but, also, various power outages and manifestations within the store. Then, one night, he finds a part of a wall in a basement which one can just magically pass through into... the backroooms. A bizarre, somewhat minimal and extremely surreal, vast place which is very unsettling and, as we find out, can be very deadly to anyone who gets lost wandering its corridors. On another trip into the realm, Clark takes his cameraman employee said cameraman's girlfriend (who both work at the store), played by Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell, to document things so he can prove to his psychiatrist he’s not mad. None of them make it out of the place on this journey in and so, when he disappears, Mary goes looking for him herself and... also stumbles on to the portal... where she also finds herself wandering the backrooms. 

And... it’s genuinely terrifying. For me anyway. I’ve talked to at least one person who didn’t find it scary at all and I can certainly understand that... it’s not full on jump scares and so on. There is a small amount goriness though and the absolute suspense of waiting to see what’s lurking around the next corner is going to affect people differently. And even though I was onto the director’s old, clichéd trick of showing something terrible happening in the opening sequence so the audience can fill in the blanks and know, before the main protagonists do, that there is something to fear in this environment... it still worked for me and I was on the edge of my seat for most of the film. 

One of the unsettling things about it is the surreal nature of the objects and creatures populating these spaces. They have been created by a force which doesn’t quite get things right. It immediately, when Clark first grabs a chair which is fused into another, made me think of the great Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, where the manifestation of the dead wife doesn’t have buttons on her replicated dress. In this movie it’s explained by the idea of describing a dog to someone who’s never seen one and then having them draw it. It’s pretty cool and I’m glad people are revisiting this kind of concept. 

And, when Mary finally finds Clark in the warren of backrooms... things take a turn and are ramped up quite a bit. It’s here that the film reaches the height of surrealism and ultimate nastiness, as we try to reframe the main protagonists and their relationship to reality. All leading to a conclusion which some people have found a little unsatisfying but I thought the film did land the ending quite well. So, nope, not everything... or anything for that matter... is explained at the end of the film but, if the writer/director had done that (and I don’t think he would want to or even knows what’s going on himself) then I don’t think you could get away with the inevitable sequel... which I’m sure this film will have. This is clearly going to start a franchise (plus be a figurehead for liminal horror for the future) and I can’t see that launching very successfully if everything were tied up in a neat little package by the end of the first film. You need something for the audience to come back to otherwise... well, otherwise they won’t. 

So that’s me done with what was, for me, a truly unsettling movie (I’m glad to say). Backrooms perhaps deserves all the fuss and box office breaking popularity its received and I’d give this one a hard recommend. 

Curse Of The Fly

Live And Let Fly

Curse Of The Fly
UK 1965 
Directed by Don Sharp 
20th Century Fox 
Shout Factory Blu Ray Zone B

Six years after Return Of The Fly (reviewed here), the British made their own follow on which, in terms of certain things, doesn’t really make sense and, also, was bound to be a bit of a disappointment. Although, as a film in its own right, I think it’s a much maligned and pretty good, old school ‘comfort horror’ myself.

Two big reasons that I suspect that this one bombed are as follows...

Let’s look at the poster for Curse Of The Fly because it says it all. The tagline reads, “Piece by piece... atom by atom... humans invisibly teleported through time and space - - Re-entering Earth as Half-human Monsters from the 4th Dimension!” Well okay then... if you take that very literally, space becomes just another dimension and so does time saved in travel, I guess. Half-human monsters are present but... yeah, this whole tagline is written in a pretty sensationalist style, it seems to me. This is not quite the film that people were getting.

But to compound that even further... there’s a big picture of a fly head on the poster and, let me tell you that asides from a quick glimpse of a photo from a previous film (and I’ll get to that later too), no flies are in any way present in this movie. So.... if you look at the word curse as meaning more of a legacy of bad luck you might just get away with it... but the audience was expecting a fly-man, thank you very much! 

Okay. so the film has two connecting tissues to the other movies. One is that it’s the next generation of the Delambre family working on a teleportation device between London, England and Montreal, the two main protagonists played by Brian Donlevy (the first movie Quatermass) and George Baker. So it’s the third generation of Delambres... but there are only six years passed between the films’ settings. Yeah, the Math’s doesn’t work out does it?

Plus... the ‘just escaped from a mental asylum’ love interest with a mysterious past, played by Carole Gray, marries the George Baker character within a week of meeting him, not knowing what she’s gotten herself into. By the way, no real revelation (unless I missed it again this time around) is made as to why she was in the asylum in the first place. All we know is that a detective is pursuing her. And as the rest of the story plays out... Baker’s first wife is still alive as a mismatched thing who unfortunately survived an earlier teleport experiment... but, hey, she can still play the piano pretty well! That’s about as much as I want to say about the story. 

Secondly, an ex detective consulted in his hospital bed is the character Inspector Charas, the helpful cop from the first movie. But, since none of the actors wanted to return for this film, he’s instead played here by Charles Carson, wearing handy sunglasses in the hopes that the audience won’t know the difference. But, again, three generations down... he still shouldn’t be looking quite this young. None of the figures are adding up!

However, all that aside... I really liked this film and I absolutely adore the opening credits. Panning in on the mental asylum, we see a window smash out with about three times the amount of glass coming towards the camera (which gives me pause to think that the film might originally have been a prospect to be shot in a 3D process). Then, the rest of the credits sequence comprises of beautifully shot scenes of Carole Gray running towards or past the camera in slow motion, wearing only a bra and panties (my mum identified the correct part of the decade this was made by the model of underwear said lady is wearing in this sequence, I’m proud to say). I love this opening and it’s backed up nicely with Bert Shefter’s quite pretty, piano dominant score for the movie. About which...

Sawtell and Shefter was often seen as a pairing on many genre soundtracks of the day. But the way they were utilised for The Fly franchise is interesting. The Fly (reviewed here) was scored by Paul Sawtell as a solo gig. Then, Return Of The Fly was scored by the familiar pairing of Sawtell and Shefter. And for Curse Of The Fly it’s Bert Shefter going solo. So... yeah... an interesting phenomenon. Can’t think of many composers who quite (even Newton Howard and Zimmer) ended up in this formation. 

And, like I said, I was fine with most of the rest of the movie and, once the initial disappointment about there being no giant fly/humans in it is overcome, it’s a pretty fun B-movie as far as I’m concerned. A fun B-movie with some absolutely breathtaking cinematography. And if you want to see another entertaining sight... this film has the great Burt Kwouk sporting a very out of place moustache. So, yeah, see it for that alone. 

My only other big problem with this is the stupidity of the movie making exactly the same mistake as many books and articles on The Fly franchise have in the past. When Charas is going through the Delambre file of the events of the very first film, he pulls out a photo of The Fly to show the detective. First of all, how would anyone have taken a photo of him like this in the first story when only his wife saw her husband in this state? But secondly... and much more alarmingly... the photo he takes out is not the fly as seen in that first movie (which is never seen without a lab coat) but the much larger headed fly from Return Of The Fly (a story which did not even involve Charas). So this makes absolutely no sense and is a really bad error, as far as I’m concerned.

And that’s me about done on Curse Of The Fly. Like I said, I really enjoyed revisiting it and am happy to watch again at some point in the future. A film perhaps better served with a title which sets up less expectations that it never satisfies but, even so, worth a watch as far as I’m concerned. 

Return Of The Fly

Flying Tonight

Return Of The Fly
USA 1959 
Directed by Edward Bernds 
20th Century Fox
Shout Factory Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: More spoilers buzzing around.

I don’t know why Return Of The Fly has such a bad rep because, I revisited again for this blog and, honestly, I think it’s a pretty well made monster B-movie. Yes, it has a completely different approach and execution to the slightly superior The Fly (reviewed here), from the year before but, it certainly works as a sequel (asides from one ridiculous continuity error which I’ll get to in a little while) and it mostly makes good sense. 

Now Vincent Price was disappointed that this wasn’t shot in colour as the first film was and, yeah, I’d like to have seen a colour version of this for sure but, I dunno, the black and white photography on this one looks pretty good to me and doesn’t detract from the overall atmosphere... if anything, adding to it and adhering more to the style of a B-movie creature feature of the time. Price, who was just about reinvented by this and a couple of other movies as the king of horror in the US, also objected to the screenplay which was reportedly a lot different to the one he signed on for by the time it reached the shooting stage but, yeah, like I said, it’s more of a throwback to something less edgy and more fun so, I dunno, it works pretty well for me. 

We start this one fifteen years after the events of the original movie, at the funeral of the leading lady character of that film, Helen. In attendance are both Vincent Price as François and the young son of Helen from the first movie, Philippe, who has grown up to be played by a young Brett Halsey, long before his days of saxophoning up young ladies’ undercarriages with his mesmerising musical prowess (yeah, I haven’t got to that movie yet but I have it in a pile to watch for the blog fairly soon, so I’ll get there). 

Philippe is a troubled student of similar electrical experimentation obsession as his father and he naturally wants ot follow in his father’s footsteps... or tarsus steps, I guess. So he and a very shady colleague called Alan, played by David Frankham, work with a reluctant François to replicate and improve on his father’s process. However, Alan is really an alias for a shady criminal who is going to steal the secrets to sell to the highest bidder. When a police guy comes after him... due to a bunny pattern being deliberately disintegrated but not yet integrated until the following day... he kills the policeman and teleports him and reintegrates him with a combination of the bunny... so we get a little bunny with human hands and feet and a big guy with bunny hands and feet... which manages to look both horrifying and utterly silly at the same time. 

Anyway, when Alan is finally discovered by Phillipe, Alan knocks him out and shuts him in the teleportation device with, you guessed it, a fly. So there you go, one big difference from this and the first one is that, in the first, the monster was created by a careless mistake while in this one, the monster is deliberately created as a purposeful act of evil. Anyway, things go badly for everyone and the resultant fly/man hybrid Phillipe goes on a rampage to find the criminal. Long story short, because the film does have some twists and turns (this is a very simplified summary), the villain is brought to justice and the two results of the teleportation mix up are sent through again, restoring Phillippe back to his former self (oh, please!). 

And I loved it. It’s a really entertaining monster movie and, it even has a big improvement on the original... at least I think so. The design of the creature (perhaps due to some gigantism problems they are having when they are first trying to perfect the teleport) is that it has a much larger, somewhat silly but satisfying fly head design and, bizarrely, this is usually also mistakenly used in lots of books and articles as being the design from the first movie. Even action figure designs (I’m going on to ebay as soon as I’ve done writing this review to try and get hold of one) tend to use the look of the creature from this sequel as a stand in for the original. 

If I had one fault with the film, other than the side lining of the romantic interest... played by Danielle De Metz making her debut in this, to just a few scenes here and there... it’s the one big continuity plot point that sticks out like a sore thumb to me. As in, the son goes back to his father’s laboratory to get his old notes but, as we all know from the first film, those notes were destroyed by his father when in his fly state... so there’s no way they could have survived but, here they are using them.

Other than that though... and with a shout out to Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter’s wonderful score (they worked together a lot, although the first film was scored only by Sawtell), I’d say that, although Return Of The Fly is more linearly structured than that interesting first feature... dispensing with the mystery and going straight for the horror... it’s a really tight and entertaining follow up and I’d certainly defend it while recommending it to others. And now I’m off to ebay to look for the Mego action figure. 

The Fly

Come Fly With Me

The Fly
USA 1958 
Directed by Kurt Neumann 
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone A

On the occasional times I revisit the original The Fly, I always come away a little more impressed by it and this new Blu Ray upgrade, part of a five film set of The Fly movies, was no exception. It probably helps that it’s been quite a while now since I last saw it. And, giving in to the Mandela Effect which a lot of people share with me on this film... I’d forgotten that it’s a colour movie as opposed to a black and white picture (like the two direct sequels which were both in monochrome) and in a proper cinemascope aspect ratio to boot. 

As such, it does play the full cinemascope variation of the 20th Century Fox theme at the start (something which is often misused in more modern films) before switching into some wonderfully stark titles of graphic illustrations of mesh in red, with a fly in them, accompanied by Paul Sawtell’s wonderful score. 

And then we get to the wonderful start of the movie and you can tell right away that the structure of this is different from most of the other ‘monster movies’ out there form this time in sci-fi Hollywoodland. This may be in part due to one of the main writers of the screenplay being the great James Clavell, who wrote such best selling tomes as Shõgun, Noble House and King Rat. In fact, we don’t meet the main scientist protagonist of the film until a good 20 - 30 minutes into the movie. Instead we start off with a night watchman hearing Andre Delambre’s death by the sound of the hydraulic press coming down twice. He investigates to find Delambre’s wife Helen, played by Patricia Owens who gives a performance that does a lot of the heavy lifting for the film, fleeing the scene. Then he sees the body of the man with his head and arm crushed by the press, the very red blood effect dripping down the side of the machine in a piece of gory aftermath which I think must have been quite incongruous with a lot of horror/sci-fi cinema at the time. 

And then the mystery starts, as both Andre’s brother Françoise, played by the wonderful Vincent Price (who would return for the first sequel) and possibly quite the nicest Police Inspector on celluloid,  Inspector Charas, played wonderfully by Herbert Marshall, try and solve the mystery of why Helen is saying she murdered her husband but won’t give any details... putting her as the number one candidate for the hangman’s noose. It’s only after a good while that she decides to tell the two men exactly what happened and we see the majority of the rest of the film playing out in flashback.

So we have the great David Hedison (billed here early in his career as Al Hedison) playing scientist Andre Delambre, who has cracked (almost, with a few alterations after accidentally disintegrating the household cat), the secret of teleporting anything from one cabinet in one room to another in the next. The film depicts the happily married couple as the obsessed scientist perfects his new invention and then, just as everything goes right, we discover that, sometime off-screen (and again, this is unusual and works a treat), Andre has tried to teleport himself and a fly that zipped into the machine with him has merged atoms with him, resulting in the fly (which escapes and becomes the major focus of his wife and child, trying to catch it) having Andre’s head and an arm, while Andre himself is left with a fly’s head and arm. This looks great when you finally see the reveal but it’s also something I conceptually have a problem with... okay, I’ll get to that in a minute. 

But again, rather than show what happened straight away, Hedison plays the fly-bound Andre silently, with a black towel over his head and pointing and rapping a desk to communicate with his wife... so the mystery element is kept in tact for a good part of the film and it works really well. And, of course, when Helen finally pulls that towel off, just like the unmasking of The Phantom Of The Opera in the 1925 version of that film, Helen lets out an iconic scream... iconic because, as she keeps on screaming, we see her from Andre’s point of view and it’s a fly’s eye view, with her screaming countenance replicated many times over the widescreen frame. Wow... this must have looked amazing in cinemas, for sure... it’s no wonder the film was such a box office hit. A box office sensation that, sadly, the director didn’t live to experience, since he died the week before it opened. 

Then, as Andre arranges for his wife to head press him to death, the film catches up to the start but, this isn’t the final iconic moment of the movie. In a much re-quoted scene, his brother and the Inspector only finally believe Helen’s story when they see the little fly caught in a spider’s web, with Andre’s arm and head, as it calls out “Help me! Help me!” as it’s about to get eaten by a spider. Apparently the scene was shot over twenty times because the two actors, Price and Marshall, were laughing so much at the scene that they couldn’t look each other in the eye.

And then comes the second of two problems I have with the movie. There’s no way their dodgy, hastily concocted explanation for the incidents in the film would be believed in a court of law but, here we are at the end with everyone free and living happily ever after. Apparently Clavell had written a much better ending where Helen kills herself after she has given her explanation but, this was sadly discarded. 

And my only other problem is... yes, we see the fly part of Andre trying to take over in his brain as he fights himself to hold on to his humanity (which looks quite ridiculous in a Doctor Strangelove kind of way) but, since his head is also on a fly, how in heck is his human brain also part of this fly head? I mean, I’m probably looking for verisimilitude where it doesn’t exist here but, the science doesn’t hold up here (yes, I know that’s a ridiculous statement about a film about a human fly but, it’s my blog, let me alone). 

And that’s me done with the absolute classic that is The Fly. A really great and somewhat different B movie which was given the budget and release of an A picture... definitely catch this one if you’ve never seen it before. And I guess I’ll at least be watching the next two films in the original series next... not sure if I want to bother with the two modern era versions again as yet.

Challenge The Devil

Deviling Up

Challenge The Devil
aka Katarsis
Italy 1963
Directed by Giuseppe Veggezzi   
Severin Films Blue Ray Zone A/B
From The Eurocrypt Of
Christopher Lee Volume 1

Okay, so... this is going to be a hard one to write up. 

Challenge The Devil is the second film presented in Severin’s first, wonderful The Eurocrypt Of Christopher Lee Blu Ray boxed set and, although the film clocks in at only 79 minutes, it honestly felt like maybe 4 hours. I mean, this was a hard one to watch and I’m used to some of the slower and less comprehensible European gothic pieces from this era (and a couple of the ones I’m thinking of are in this boxed edition, as it happens). I’m not 100% sure how to approach writing this one so I’m just going to throw the meagre plot in, such as it is... and then relate the behind the scenes story of how the movie came to be transformed from being what was probably a bit of a mess to being, frankly, even more of a mess.

Okay, so the film starts off well enough with some interesting cinematography where, whoever is behind this part of the film, is using strong architectural lines to pull the eye into the shot rather well. And it does well to detract from the sparse plot, where a man who is deemed to be a black mailer is shot by two thugs, escaping into a church with his wounds to find a priest, Father Guardiano, played by Ulderico Sciaretta. There’s a pretty nice shot in amongst these scenes where the man is lying in bed reflected in a mirror, with Guardiano looking down to the mirror and talking to him. These clever shot choices do not remain in the movie for long, however... 

The man explains his blackmail material has been stolen by his gal for more nefarious purposes so, after patching him up, Guardiano goes to find the lady at a night club and explain why she should return the materials. So then we are in the nightclub and we then see no less than three acts play out, more or less in their entirety, stopping the film dead, each of which having pretty much nothing to do with the story in any way, shape or form. These include “Argentinian singing sensation Sonia” who is clearly miming along to a dubbed recording of one of her, presumably ‘hit’, records. Either that or the small band accompanying her on stage have hidden the female backing vocal group in the toilets of this small venue and maybe left the door open.

Then Guardiano finds the girl and relates his back story of how he came to be a priest. And at this point, he tells of the time he was an animalistic hooligan in a gang who got trapped in a castle where the devil, a relatively brief appearance by Christopher Lee, challenged them with the task of finding a lady in the castle before sunrise. The rest of the film is a flashback of this as they stumble around to imagined... or at least far from convincing... dangers and then escape in the end to lead better lives. We then return briefly as the girl hands the papers over, moved by Guardiano’s truly boring story, to do the right thing. What the heck?

Okay, as soon as we entered the flashback stage, my Al Adamson style patch job radar instinct kicked in. This was either two films spliced together or, more likely (as turned out to be the case), somebody trying to rescue the shoddy original movie and make it more commercially viable (and failing quite badly at it, I have to say). 

It turns out (in one of Severin’s thorough extras) that director Veggezzi was trying to break into the movie business. This was his only film and he gave up after his experiences with this. He shot a ninety minute movie full of careful consideration to body language and the movements of people but with a lot of improvisation. This shows in the final product, as there’s not much dialogue, the actors all move in heightened and bizarrely over the top ways (this is a movie which is totally over acted but, honestly, after hearing about the creation of the film, I can’t blame the actors for doing what they were told) and often look, at times, like they are trying to figure out just what to do with themselves in some of the scenes. 

Okay so... even on the first shoot, Veggezzi apparently didn’t do all of it himself. After one of the actresses rejected his romantic advances, the director responded by trying to kill himself, throwing himself out of a hotel window.... although he survived (he couldn’t even do that right, I guess) and spent some time recovering. Then the small production company bankrolling the film went under. The film was sold to another company and Veggezzi did not have access to it anymore. The other company retained one of the actors (Ulderico Sciaretta) then added the completely tonally different, framing ‘story’ and tried to release it like that. I don’t think the film was a success. 

The director, embittered by his experience, turned his back on the world of film, joined a kind of super communist party, cut down a sacred tree on a pilgrimage site with his drunken friends one night (yeah, they got the wrong tree)... and then lived out his days writing poetry, being ultra political and making some... not too impressive, I have to say... sculptures. He then got killed when he was hit by a car in his town one night, decades later. 

I never heard of him before but he managed to make a really dull film, I would say. Berto Pisano’s replacement score is interesting sometimes but, often not sitting well with some of the visuals, I’d have to say (at times it sounds like a kind of bastard love child of Italian jazz and Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, playing through a scene with no consideration for what is actually going on and destroying the atmosphere). Some of the ‘fish out of water’ actors in this are kinda interesting at times, such as the constantly laughing George Ardisson but, yeah, that’s about it. All in all I’m glad I saw this one and am grateful that Severin have managed to restore it for their Blu Ray set. Whether it was worth doing is arguable but I’m sure it must have its fans somewhere. I wouldn’t count myself as one of them and I think I would mostly warn people off of this one... I certainly wouldn’t recommend it anyone I know. 

Zeder

Pop K-Zones

Zeder
aka Revenge Of The Dead
Italy 1983 Directed by Pupi Avati
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Gets into spoiler territory for the last shot of the movie.

Wow... Zeder is far more restrained and atmospheric than I would expect from any other Italian horror film which springs to mind from the same decade as this. It’s written and directed by Pupi Avati, best known in this country for his celebrated giallo The House With Laughing Windows (yeah, can’t remember if I liked that one or not but it’s in one of the Blu Ray upgrade piles for me to revisit for the blog at some point in the future) and it’s got, to my mind, a surprisingly Western attitude in the way it’s been shot and edited. 

This one starts off with an extended prologue set in 1956, where a young girl is being used by researchers to find the once dead guy who is sometimes getting up and rising from a hidden burial ground to kill the occasional person. In the process, the little girl is ferociously attacked by the object of the researchers’ desire and she has to have a leg amputated. 

We then switch to the present day and a young couple, Stefano (played by Gabriele Lavia, who has been in at least three Argento movies at this point) and Alessandra (played by Anne Canovas). On their first year of a wedding anniversary, Allessandra gifts Stefano a present of an old, electric typewriter... Stefano being a budding novelist working on his third novel (even though the first two have not found a publisher). Then, as he is trying it out, he finds the remains of two letters on the remnants of the old typewriter ribbon, written by one Paulo Zeder and talking about overcoming the barriers of death and about the mysterious K-Zones which can be found dotted around the planet. Basically, areas of anti-time are found two metres below the Earth in certain places which allow for a return from death. Zeder has donated his own body to the research and hidden it. 

Realising that this is an excellent idea for his third novel, Stefano and the reluctant Alessandra begin to investigate and end up stumbling into a conspiracy of an interested party who seem to be working hand in hand with the police and who also are acting out of their research, funded by a private investor and made possible by special order of the church and involving the secret archives in Vatican City. This all culminates in a bunch of researchers who cross paths with Stefano and, via mysterious bloody deaths and secret passages etc, all end up in the grounds of a long abandoned hotel and its K-Zone in the grounds. 

And yeah... it feels like a somewhat suppressed Italian horror film of the period... RAI TV seem to have put money into it so I suspect the reduced opportunities for gore and the more subtle approach might indicate it was originally made with an Italian TV broadcast in mind but instead given a theatrical release. That’s my guess. 

So what you have here is a strange hybrid. A bunch of familiar Italian faces embroiled in a conspiracy theory which is somewhat like a procedural in a giallo or a polizei with a score by the great Riz Ortolani which definitely (and I suspect quite deliberately) goes into the kind of Goblin-like territory found in a lot of the Italian horrors of this period. But, as I said, it’s quite restrained in the way it’s doing things... with a definite slow burn kind of atmosphere and, to my mind, this makes it much more watchable (though perhaps not as fun) as a lot of its contemporaries. 

Similarly, Lavia and Canovas seem a lot stronger and subtler in their performances here than in other films I could name, which all adds to the atmosphere that the government and some religious order are collaborating to find out just what is going on and, it is hinted, making sure the knowledge is in the hands of only a few. Because, of course, who wants a cure for death on an already overpopulated planet. 

Now, I can’t imagine being as gripped and enthralled as I was by a second watch of this one (although I will certainly try in a decade or so) as much as, say, a film by Fulci or Argento... but for the first watch, I was certainly on the edge of my seat for some of it and intrigued to see how the premise was going to be revealed. There was the occasional jump scare in the movie too... one of the most effective of which kinda made no sense. I mean, why would a bunch of pigeons come to be found and released from inside a closed coffin? But it’s fine, the quality of the rest of the film excuses these little indulgences. 

The end of Zeder was something which I found was nicely ambiguous too. Although it supports the underlying premise of the film in no uncertain terms, it also manages to be nicely vague in its tone. I mean, that last shot... is Stefano screaming in pain because of something which is happening to him behind his back or is he voicing the repercussions of what he, himself, has brought about? It is, perhaps, an unsettling moment when looked back in contemplation... which is a nice description of the film itself, I think. I’ve been ummming and ahhing about whether I should pick this one up for years and now that I have, I wish I’d seen this one sooner. It’s an untypical entry into the Italian horror genre... at least compared to many of the ones I’ve seen. 

Munster, Go Home!

Ill Manors

Munster, Go Home!
Directed by Earl Bellamy
USA 1966
Universal Zone B Blu Ray

A week or two before filming began on Munster, Go Home!,  the first (and last) film to feature the majority of the original cast of The Munsters in colour, said cast found out that the show they had been so successful with for the last three years had been cancelled, trounced soundly in the ratings by Batman. But the producers went ahead with the movie hoping this would either gain interest from another studio picking up the show or, who knows, even carry it on as a series of feature films. Alas, the film flopped and so that was the end, for a while, of The Munsters. 

And, although this movie has been on British TV a number of times over the years, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before now (although I have got the soundtrack CD somewhere). 

And it’s… honestly not that great a film and, I think I can almost put my finger on why but, I’ll get to that in a minute. But first, that cast…

So returning form the original show we have Fred Gwynne as the Frankenstein’s monster-like Herman Munster, Yvonne De Carlo as his vampiric wife Lily Munster, Al Lewis as the Dracula based Grandpa Munster and Butch Patrick as son Eddie Munster. And… um… Debbie Watson as the glamorous Marilyn Munster. Yeah, that’s right, regular Marilyn Pat Priest was effectively fired from the role because Universal wanted to try and build up Watson as a new star. I don’t think it worked out for either of them.

Rounding out the cast, which is set in England after Herman inherits the Munster estate in England and becomes Lord Munster, are the great Terry Thomas, Hermione Gingold and John Carradine. 

And there are all kinds of high comedy shenanigans, first on the ship over to England and then in the English village... where Marilyn gets a love interest in a rival family, a counterfeiting operation is discovered in the cellars of the house and Herman has to dodge the assassination attempts of a family member and come first in a drag race (driving his coffin turned into a car Drag-u-la! Hmm.).

And it’s not great. To show Terry Thomas is a relative of Herman, they have him throwing Herman-like Tantrums and acting quite childishly and… yeah… I got the feeling that the Americans almost but, not quite, knew what Thomas was about. It certainly doesn’t sit well when he breaks into this stuff and kinda lowers the tone of the movie, I felt. 

But the worst thing about this one, I think, is that the story and even some of the gags are not badly performed… but they seem to be executed in a way that is just a little over the top and written for a TV audience, it seemed to me. It’s almost like extra pauses have been given between the jokes to wait for the canned laughter to kick in (which is why I’d probably hate the show if I were ever to revisit it in so called adulthood… I hate laughter tracks). So things seem a little mistimed and just a little too broad for a big screen environment, as far as I'm concerned. 

All that being said, Jack Marshall’s score is serviceable (although, good luck if you are waiting for him to make really good use of the main theme tune arrangement which used to open the show), the colours are often beautiful - Grandpa’s lab in greens and reds gets ‘full on Bava’, for example - and there’s enough going on to hold the interest. Plus my mum really liked it and so I can’t judge it too badly, as I bought it to watch with her in mind. It just wasn’t really for me, in the end… although I’m sure I would have loved it if I’d seen it as a kid. 

There’s even a nice metatextual nod in a scene where Herman and Grandpa need to raise help and Herman yells out, “Car 54 Where Are You?”. Of course, Fred Gwynne and Al Lewis were the stars of the show Car 54 Where Are You? prior to starring in The Munsters, so, yeah, that would have meant more to audiences at the time I suspect (though I pointed at the screen when Herman shouted this).

All in all, Munster, Go Home! is something of a novelty movie and, though I could see myself sitting through it again in another decade or so, it’s not really one I’d recommend to many people whose age is in double digits. Which might possibly have been the point although, I suspect this one was aimed directly at a teenage audience. This one didn’t quite do it for me.

Castle Of The Living Dead

Villainous Preserve

Castle Of The Living Dead
aka Il castello dei morti vivi
Directed by Warren Kiefer & Luciano Ricci
Italy/France 1964 Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Castle Of The Living Dead has, it seems, a troubled production history. Warren Kiefer was definitely involved to some extent but the film may, or may not, have had a few directors and also, apparently, involved future director Michael Reeves in the crew in some capacity. There has been some rumours that this is one of the many films that Mario Bava helped out on with the special effects but, again, nothing has actually been confirmed and the scene on which he is supposed to have worked doesn’t seem to appear in the movie. Also, the dialogue was not recorded on paper so, when the various actors had to do the dubbing of their lines afterwards, as many films of this nature in Italian cinema are shot without sound, they had to more or less remember or make up what they had been saying. 

However, for all that, the film was quite a joy to watch and it’s an interesting gothic thriller, set just after the Napoleonic wars, when Napoleon was in prison. I thought I’d seen this one already but it turns out I hadn’t so, I was very happy to give this one a play. The film is shot in a crisp black and white (as evidenced by Severin’s masterful restoration/transfer of this thing) and concerns a travelling troupe of performers who are invited to Count Drago’s castle to give a private performance. The two main actors in this troupe, one a very recent recruit after some conflict at the start of the film, are Philippe Leroy as Eric, who was so brilliant in movies like Without Knowing Anything About Her (reviewed here) and who has a fairly good screen presence for a main, male protagonist... and Gaia Germani as Laura. 

Count Drago, as played by Christopher Lee (this is one of the films in the magnificent Blu Ray box set put out from Severin Films... The Eurocrypt Of Christopher Lee Volume 1), is a mad scientist with requisite henchman to do his bidding. He has invented a formula which, when introduced into a live subject either by injection or in a spiked drink, brings instant paralysis and rigidity... an advanced, instant embalming fluid which preserves the subject instantly and forever. This is wonderfully demonstrated, not just by the collection of frozen human beings in the Count’s own collection but, also in a wonderful scene where a cat licks up Laura’s spilled drink and instantly freezes... that is to say, the shot is held in a freeze frame and then goes about cutting to and from Laura’s reaction to save on any unnecessary special effects. 

The film then becomes a kind of cat and mouse game around the castle, as the troupe try and avoid death at the hands of Drago but also try to stay out of trouble with the local law enforcement, in the guise of a very young, almost his first feature film role, Donald Sutherland. Sutherland actually has three roles in this film... Sgt. Paul/The Witch and The Old Man. Frankly, I only spotted him as the Sergeant and again in drag several times as the old witch but, I guess he might have been an old man in the opening sequence and I somehow missed him in a crowd. I’m guessing it’s no coincidence that writer/director Warren Kiefer’s last name is the same forename as Sutherland’s famous acting son? 

The actors in this are all turning in a pretty decent performance, with Lee in excellent form (although the black make up around the eyes looks a little fake while succeeding in changing the look of his face somewhat) and with Sutherland hamming it up good, I would say. I’m assuming his role here somehow landed him a part in his next feature, Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors (reviewed by me here). Since Christopher Lee is also in that movie, one wonders if Sutherland and Lee got on so well in this one that Lee perhaps recommended he be included in that little gem also?

And it’s a bit of a romp but has a very chilled atmosphere... a bit like one of Roger Corman’s Poe cycle of films... and it’s all shot in a beautiful castle and grounds called Castello Orsini-Odescalchi (where Tom Cruise would later marry Katie Holmes, apparently) and in a wonderful set of grounds called The Park Of Monsters in Bomarzo. These grounds include big statues and architectural features such as a main walkway in the shape of a screaming face with the mouth as the opening. I recognised this last architectural feature straight away as being included on the cover photograph of the 1995 Michael Nyman album Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs. That being said, because of the skilful way in which the film has been cut together, the fact that the grounds were mostly shot somewhere else was a surprise to me, as it looks like they are in the same location in this and that the park dovetails straight into the castle. 

 And all this with a fairly typical, creaky old gothic style score by Italian maestro Angelo Francesco Lavagnino. I actually already had this score on a nice CD issue from Digitmovies from some years ago but, if you missed that release, Severin include the score on a separate CD as an extra feature in this boxed edition. Which is always a big draw for me on sets like this (although I wish the majority of the scores Severin decide to include weren’t already ones that have already been issued). 

All in all, this movie really wouldn’t set anyone on fire but, I think it holds its own and has a fascinating kind of DNA shared with those old 1960s Corman flicks and, also, maybe, a kind of specific Gold Key comics atmosphere to the whole thing (which I can’t really explain in words that would necessarily make sense to anybody else but, yeah, that means something to me). By that I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that people go out of their way to see Castle Of The Living Dead but, boxed up with others in a similar vein (such as Crypt Of The Vampire, which I reviewed in an old DVD edition here years ago), it’s certainly an interesting addition and, certainly, one of the hidden gems of the box.